Todd Gilchrist

Since making his debut with “Zombieland,” director Ruben Fleischer has developed an aptitude for cheerful proficiency (if not a ton of discernible personality) that he deploys to great effect in this brisk pastiche, especially with Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg bickering their way through one set piece after another.

Blacklight is an unsurprisingly tepid action thriller which extends this odd phase of Neeson’s career, but the best thing that can probably be said about it is that it’s not materially worse than most of the others.

The control and confidence of its form, paired with an emotionality that is at once effortless and irresistibly powerful, makes the film feel to the audience the way those pointed and yet somehow ephemeral clips in Yang’s memory feel to Jake. In preying on a sensation that’s only indirectly remembered, the impact it makes becomes unforgettable.

Vaughn’s third installment in this series is ultimately a pretty lousy movie; again, better than the last one, but that isn’t much of a compliment.

It’s a story ripped from at least a few years of headlines, and a subject about which there has been much debate. It may or may not come as a surprise, then, that a single two-hour film fails to sufficiently capture its complexities, even working from a compelling premise with a gifted cast.

On a level of sheer cinematic flourish, Miranda’s adaptation is a triumph; he really harnesses Larson’s songs for the screen and gives them tremendous life, whether or not you’d seen them before on stage.

Greene’s film explores not just the ability of art to repair emotional and sometimes physical injuries but also the resiliency of the human spirit and the solidarity of a group of individuals collaborating to provide comfort for themselves and each other through shared, unimaginable pain.

Without the willingness to connect the dots between his very powerful examples, Chandler creates the opportunity to indict America’s culture of violence and then disappointingly misses his shot.

Committed performances by Keri Russell, Jesse Plemons and extraordinary young actor Jeremy T. Thomas vividly communicate the deeper emotional stakes of Antlers, if somewhat unfortunately without adding an ounce of fun or excitement to its mythmaking.

The filmmaker’s juxtaposition of overworked physicians and desperate patients offers a concentrated and intimate look at the bottomless, unimaginable depths of loss as well as the indefatigable reservoir of hope that sustains humanity during its darkest moments.

Even if it was long overdue, or maybe precisely because it was, “Black Widow” still felt like the remnant of a timeline before heroes had reached total market saturation. “Shang-Chi,” by comparison, feels like the new beginning that its predecessor was meant to be, as much as anything, because it truly ventures in a new direction — building distantly on the world that has now become common moviegoer knowledge, but adding stylistic flourishes and an unhurried pace from Cretton that suggests it’s content to be its own story instead of a cog in a larger machine.

Ultimately, Campbell’s film fails because it can’t decide whether to be cheeky escapism or a thoughtful character study, instead landing in between with something repetitive and too often a little dull.

The filmmaker’s diminishing capacity for recognizing naturalistic human behavior once again presents a problem when the time comes for audiences to relate to, much less care about, characters put through the paces of another elevator pitch that he never develops into a compelling story.

The Go-Go’s tackles the seminal all-female ’80s rock band with such honesty, openness and effervescence that it not only rises above that clichéd, almost telegraphed arc but transcends the ranks of other music documentaries to offer a story you desperately want to keep watching, even when you already know where it’s going.

Lost Girls is a story that works much better if you do a Google search before watching it, not after, since it offers a lot of convenient human truths, but not enough hard facts.

Tollman’s promise as a writer and director is evident, but not unlike his ambitious and untested protagonist, an editor might be what he needs most, whether or not he knows it.

O’Connor’s work here behind the camera is equal to Affleck’s in front of it, as the two of them navigate this character’s complex minefield of shortcomings both earned and adopted, never letting him off the hook but attempting to explore and understand how and why these destructive patterns of behavior settle into rhythm.

Funny and honest in equal measures, like a good stand-up routine, Standing Up, Falling Down uses a light touch to teach us there’s always more to learn.

Ultimately, “Viral” feels like the sequel or second season in a series where a first (or at the very least, a recap) would have been helpful. As a topic of tremendous ongoing importance with roots that desperately need exploration, anti-Semitism deserves, and needs, a look into its global impact and perpetuation that makes a deeper dive than this documentary provides.

The Grudge 2020 is a prestige drama sidelined by lackluster, incoherent horror, ruining the scares and undercutting the humanity of its characters.

American Dharma unfortunately brings its audience only to the brink of real discovery.

Harper’s is that rare movie that works much better when the characters are finding solutions and working together rather than falling into conflict and creating problems.

Queen & Slim is convincingly and unapologetically multidimensional in its portrayal of its characters; as our perception of them shifts from one scene to the next, we realize they’re not ciphers for communities, cultures, arguments or belief systems, but individuals wrestling with who they are and how they present themselves to the world.

For an artist who is committed (for better or worse) to always putting out the purest and most unfiltered portrait of who he is and what he believes, the main problem with documenting this particular moment in this way is that it goes by far too quickly, when it’s the first he’s created in a long time that has the potential to truly change hearts and minds — and best of all, not even solely about Kanye West himself.

Director and co-writer J.D. Dillard (“Sleight”) delivers a smart, streamlined thriller that skillfully integrates a careful whisper of social commentary into a story that also unfolds masterfully as a straightforward genre workout.

It documents the unexpected timelessness underlying a hopelessly contemporary phenomenon by looking at the very specific ways the current generation of teenagers engage the world around them, pointing out the inevitable, inescapable sameness of the way the world always has, and will, look back.

No one has ever accused a Gerard Butler action movie of being too smart, but “Angel Has Fallen” operates on such a level of half-considered logic and improbable motivations that even moderately well-mounted action can’t distract audiences from how dumb it is.

Roberts populates convincingly elaborate underwater sets with a suitably appealing cast for a claustrophobic adventure that manages to deliver some real terror before it somewhat inevitably levels up into absurdity.